The End of Hypocrisy with Martha Finnemore

The U.S. government seems outraged that people are leaking classified materials about its less attractive behavior. It certainly acts that way: three years ago, after Chelsea Manning, an army private then known as Bradley Manning, turned over hundreds of thousands of classified cables to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, U.S. authorities imprisoned the soldier under conditions that the UN special rapporteur on torture deemed cruel and inhumane. The Senate’s top Republican, Mitch McConnell, appearing on Meet the Press shortly thereafter, called WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, “a high-tech terrorist.”

More recently, following the disclosures about U.S. spying programs

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Other Writing:

Essay

There is no alternative

Governments now answer to business, not voters. Mainstream parties grow ever harder to distinguish. Is democracy dead? Last September, Il Partito Democratico, the Italian Democratic Party, asked me to talk about politics and the internet at its summer school in Cortona. Political summer schools are usually pleasant — Cortona is a medieval Tuscan hill town ...
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Chapter in an Edited Volume

“Negotiating Privacy across Arenas – The EU-US ‘Safe Harbor’ Discussions,” in Common Goods: Reinventing European and International Governance – ed. Adrienne Hèritier

Much recent theoretical attention has been devoted to the provision of common goods across arenas. The normal problems of common good provision (Olson 1968; Hardin 1982) are exacerbated when these problems spill across arenas (there are usually no actors capable of imposing hierarchical solutions), but there are also new difficulties. Solutions in one particular arena ...
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